Poli 360

Over the past weekend, I found myself encountering a protest in Vancouver held by a group of Falun Gong followers who were protesting the prosecution of their religion by the Chinese Communist Part (CCP) in China. I was intrigued by this topic and further looked into it for my blog post this week. Upon researching the Falun Gong religion, and its place in china, I’m absolutely appalled with how the international community has allowed the Chinese government to get away with the persecution of innocent individuals because of the religion they practice. More light needs to be shed on this topic of contention, and the international community needs to become more aware of the horrible things the CCP is doing to its citizens.

To summarize what Falun Gong, or Falun Dafa is, it is an international group that is meant to teach meditation techniques, but the CCP see’s these practices as harmful, and has outlawed and persecuted the group beginning in 1999. What is intriguing is the narrow crackdown on this religion alone, whilst Christianity and Buddhism are still highly popular in China. Research into the religion found ideals of meditation in ways of curing illness and promoting health, as well as disapproving of homosexuality and self-sacrifice to reach a sanctioned race in heaven. The Chinese government justifies their persecution of these practitioners as protecting their citizens against a harmful cult; however, the consequences of being found practicing this religion in China are a clear violation of human rights.

Watching the protest of these activists in Vancouver was quite disturbing, as they had displayed an array of torture victims for the crowd to experience shock value from. Actors were tied up with rope, placed under a body bag, or splattered with blood. Discussing the topic with an activist at this protest, she informed me what the controversial demonstration was all about. According to her, the Chinese government takes into custody those that practice Falun Gong, but the methods of persecution include, and are not limited to, organ harvesting, physical torture, psychiatric torture, psychological abuse, rape and sexual assault, arbitrary imprisonment and slavery, and destitution. Further research into the topic led me to an article stating “Sometime around the year 2000, prison officials and doctors started colluding to give systematic medical testing to Falun Gong detainees – testing that suspiciously ignored injuries but checked the health of vital organs. Then, when a patient needed an organ, a suitable detainee would be matched, killed, and his or her organ taken and used for a transplant operation. In a macabre innovation to lessen the change of organ rejection, their organs were extracted before they were formally declared dead. The body would be cremated to destroy evidence of their cause of death. One Chinese website boasts that it could provide matching organs in 1-4 weeks, a time frame medical experts say is impossible unless the Chinese hospitals had access to a huge stock of living organ “donors.””

I find it interesting that as part of the western hemisphere, we rarely hear of acts of torture such as these because they are beyond our sphere of influence. The media we are subjected to report acts of terror across the world, and violent crimes of the ISIS, Taliban, and Al Qaeda, but we hardly ever hear about things that happen in the confines of another country when they do not affect anyone else but the citizens that live inside those bounds. Even more, we rarely hear about events where the US specifically does not have a huge strain of influence. What I also find surprising is the fact that this is not an international outrage, even though China is a huge rising world leader. Also that the fact that the Chinese government has denied requests consistently from the United Nations Committee Against Torture for information on the sources of the organs that they seemingly have a plentiful supply of.  The fact that it is widely known that there is in fact no large public organ donation system in China, yet a bountiful supply of organs is alarming.

Although the acts of this religion may seem to be different, their ideas aren’t any more absurd than other religions present in this world. From a human rights standpoint, the people who are being persecuted and ultimately killed for their organs to be sold, have every right to practice what they believe in. I find it very interesting that there is not a greater international response to a current genocide that has been happening for almost 15 years now in the country with the worlds highest population.

Despite it being possibly the largest human rights violation happening in the world currently, little is being done to counteract these violent crimes on Chinese citizens. There needs to be more awareness in the international sphere, and the Chinese government needs to be held accountable for its crimes.